#site-related

I’ve been putting off upgrading from Jekyll 3.10. Partly late-adopter habit, partly because my setup worked fine, and a version bump seemed simple enough. I should know better by now. It mostly was.

I was talking to someone about foobar2000 and how prolific I’d been in the customisation scene back in the day. I knew I’d written up a detailed config somewhere, with screenshots and everything, but the domain was long gone and I hadn’t thought about it in years. On a whim I punched moglenstar.net into the Wayback Machine and there it was, cached HTML from a site I’d let lapse almost two decades ago. That led to more searching.

I’ve been running Known as my social posting hub for a while now. It’s a solid IndieWeb-friendly CMS that handles status updates, photos, and syndication to various silos. Recently I upgraded my instance for the first time in about four years, which meant dealing with all the little tweaks I’d made to core templates over that time. Previously I’d just edited core files directly, which meant upgrades would wipe my changes. After four years I had no idea what I’d even modified (I’ll go into the archaeology of that in another post). This time I decided to do it properly, and ended up writing four plugins.

This year I moved the blog from GitHub Pages’ built-in Jekyll to a GitHub Actions workflow, then added .txt URL support for posts. Inspired by Terence Eden’s blog post about text-only websites.

If you were familiar with Dingoonity, you might have noticed by now that I’ve made the decision to shut down the website.

I always find it hard to find things to write about when I have a blog. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just I don’t like writing. I’ve been busy this past week, creating a new community for the Dingoo A320 portable game device. The community is called “Dingoonity” and is available at http://dingoonity.org I’ve been constantly working on improving Dingoonity since it launched on Friday at 7pm, and so I’ve had little time to work on much else. Dingoonity features a Simple Machines Forum powered BBS, and since today a SMF powered news page which I wrote using SMF’s SSI.php functions. Working on this project has been a great experience so far. The Dingoo community is very much alive and crunching out new homebrew releases for both the Dingoo official firmware, and the “Dingux” linux port for the Dingoo. I will probably post some more Dingoonity-related posts later, aswell as updating my portfolio with the Dingoonity designs when I finish the tweaks.

Changed the design of the site a little today, wasn’t happy with the old top navigation.

Safer than running with scissors, go and check out the Potatochop Battle section now!

Bear with me while i port it over to wordpress. Update: the design is pretty much done now, after much reiteration.

Today i decided to make some changes/updates to the site.. tweaked k2 a bit, the graphics you see (with exception of the silk icons) are all pixelled by me, and yes it’s very mario inspired :) i added a few pages, and a new small icon set - you can check that out on the free icons page

yes, i’ve installed wordpress, and i’m using a template.. so shoot me. for the mean time, until cmogs is finished this is what i’m going to use

so, moglenstar.net is back.. downtime recently (if anybody noticed, or cares) was because the domain expired.. well, it’s all back now thanks to neom i’m still working on the new design, and in the midst of writing a php based cms (which this entry is actually being posted from). the rest of the site should be online soon enough!

so the design is looking very different from when i put this up.. .. well, i decided to keep the roots of the old moglenstar.net, keeping with an old image and all.. i recycled the header! and now its all dark and stuff, looks good in IE too.

So i’ve been working on the new redesign, not much, but i’ve been working on it. using blogger to power the site now, i might chuck one of those neat “blogger powered” buttons on here somwhere, soon enough, perhaps on the about page, when i get around to re-writing it. the pixel art page is about 40% complete, i’ve re-done all of the descriptions for each piece, but i am yet to torture myself by making thumbnails for each and every piece of pixel art.. regardless of how few there are, its still a tedious task. i dont plan to enable commenting on my blog, on account of how much spam/crap posts i got before, when i was using wordpress, so if you read anything here, and you wish to talk to me about it, i’ll put an e-mail link on the about page, when i get around to writing it. that said, anyone watching this, expect some magic soon enough!

the only problem i find with providing the ability to comment on posts, on my site, is that “online poker” spam gets posted all over the comments fucking idiots spam and abuse the comments i’ve deleted said comments, and now comment moderation is on, so if youre comment doesnt show, its waiting for me to check and allow it to be posted

so i’ve been ill for the last week and a half, missed a bit of college last week because of it, unfortunately… i haven’t done much work with the new design, aside from re-writing the css so as to make the design more centered, it didnt look so good down the left hand side - i also re-worked the graphics, and the menu presentation. i’ve decided to make a few changes to this design as it is, so if you’re viewing this and it looks a bit odd, i’m either working on it, or i made something look completely stupid. I ditched the “sperm” like header in favour for this.. green.. light.. thing. yeh.

finally, after a long break, i decided to work on my site again, i’ve been working on the design for a few weeks on and off, and now im having to change it to fit around WordPress .. not too much of a problem, its a nice engine to work with, and you dont have to go through any of that Site rebuilding crap, as with MovableType. getting content on a website is a painful task.. well, i’ve pretty much done all of the pixel art, just need to get that up here now with this part of the site. time to get something to eat, however, then i can really start to work!

ok.. just finished getting the pixel art section, and about page up, thank God i had already been working on the pixel art page… it’s not even complete, and i’m fed up with adding the rest of my pixel art to it.. oh well, all that isn’t on there is some random pixel things, and some emoticon type things - i’m sure it’ll survive without it :p the about page is some hella creative writing. just set up an audioscrobbler account, so we’ll see how that goes.. my user page if you’re at all interested in what im listening to..

the new design is up, still doing parts of it.. like color schemes and there is some text formatting to finish still, but the design is up.. not so drab, eh? the archives/comments pages look a bi- no.. VERY shit at the moment.. bah i’ll fix them soon enough.. the main thing is the new design is up so dont complain

Eugh! it’s so bland.. i think i’m going to- insert puking noise here

well, its sunday night.. kinda pissed off that i lost an hours sleep last night.. (who’s idea to put clocks an hour forward?) this site doesnt seem to be doing anything at the moment, and equally i dont seem to be doing anything. this weekend, i was Supposed to do maths coursework for my lesson tomorrow (2:20pm) – but its sunday night, i got as far as reading over the sheet, deciding it was stupid, working out some kind of thesis for what it was that it’s about, and then writing the title in Word… and even now, Word sits minimized on my desktop, i haven’t even bothered to save the non-evident document… I suppose this is what Phill considers procrastination – i mean, i know I have to do this work, and i try to tell myself i want to, but i just CAN’T oh well, i have the whole morning free tomorrow, i suppose i can get a justifiable amount of it done then, in time for the lesson.. – heres hoping i’m not the only one who hasn’t done it.. although, i know Scott hasn’t done it yet either ;) —— i would be a liar if i said i have done absolutely nothing.. but what i have done is far from useful.

… i intend to get the site going properly, that means finishing the design and pages … – i’ll have to talk to phill about him writing some content – i got to sort any downloads out, this being anything from modded system files to desktop icons and wallpapers (i have a few treats lined up) – i suppose i could talk scott into saying hi, and introducing himself.. perhaps… the site is going to be a mess, and will have a nice facelift.. im hoping it wont go pear shaped like cher and her facelift, but you never know! we’ll see anyways, inbetween sleeping, eating, the occasional math or computing lesson, and some coursework.. i suppose i could get a lot done…

it looks like i’ve deserted the site.. well, no. i havent.. working on a “refresh” to the site.. i’ve just been unusually busy this past week or two.. .. it will be done soon enough though :)